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For all you data lovers out there, here are some of the hand breakdowns for my sessions this holiday weekend. The sessions went well and would have been winners each and every time if I didn’t lose a few big pots.

My game is solid, I pick up pots pretty often when I stay past the flop, but I definitely made a couple calls that cost me my profitability on some big pots. That’s a leak I’m working on fixing, as it is a very expensive one. 🙂

The first session was pretty rocky, but the second and third were solid save those big losses. All in all, I’m even for the weekend, and I’ve identified and addressed a big issue in my play, so I’m calling it a win!

Statistics for 168 Hands

Statistics for 135 Hands

Statistics for 235 Hands

After a stellar start to my play chip career at FullTiltPoker.NET, where in a few days I ran my initial 1,000 chips up to 100,000, lost them back down to 10,000, ran them back up to 100,000, and then went broke, I’ve been struggling. In addition to getting cold decked, where I’ve sat for hours without many playable hands, I have literally never seen so many two- and three-outers hit before in my life. An “out” is a card that’s left in the deck that can help your hand. For example, if I have a pair of aces and my opponent has a pair of kings, my opponent must catch one of the two remaining kings in the deck to beat me. Hence, he has a two-outer. They kept hitting. These soul crushing suckouts are the reason my chip stack has been so wildly variant.

After going bust, I’ve had a bitch of a time building up a stack again. It seems like every low limit table I play at is filled with noobs who go all-in with any two cards and hit them. At one point I got so frustrated with getting beaten this way that I actually started playing bad hands for all my chips thinking that they had to win. 😉 I also tried waiting until there were several all-ins ahead of me and just calling, hoping to get lucky, and triple up or better – just so I could go play at the next higher limit table where, presumably, there’d be fewer shenanigans and more serious play. That strategy didn’t work either.

So for now I’ve defaulted to the way many poker players get started building their bankrolls: I play 10/20 Limit games now. Limit games are different than No Limit games in that you can only raise one bet at a time, rather than put more or all of your chips on the line at any one time. There’s a lot less of a rush to be had playing limit, it’s a slower game, and much more mathematical in it’s play. The best hand always wins, and more often than not, the best possible hand is shown. It’s a game of odds: when it costs you one bet to possibly win 20 bets, you have the right odds to make that bet because there’s hand in poker that’s worse than a 16:1 dog. Now, if you’re drawing to one card and one card only, on the river, you only have a 2.5% chance of getting that card. But if you need say, any of the four remaining sixes in the deck, you have nearly a 10% chance of getting it on the river. That means one time out of ten you’ll hit it. If the pot is laying you 10 bets to call one bet, it’s mathematically the correct play to make that bet, despite the long odds. It only has to pay out one time out of ten to be the mathematically correct play.

So I’ve been grinding it out at the limit tables. I’ve doubled my initial 1,000 to just over 2,200, and am less bitter about losing to suckouts because they’re a lot easier to read in limit hold ’em – and they only cost me one more bet. I’m working on my reads, which are pretty spot-on, despite not being able to see the players behind the cards. Limit is easy that way. Limit is also known as “No Fold ‘Em Hold ‘Em” because so many times people call down to the river card. It’s easy to spot trips when they’ve just smooth called, the board pairs, and they suddenly raise. It’s easy to spot a flush when they hit. Limit hold ’em becomes a dance of sorts, trying to play your cards properly, yet still throw off your opponents. I have purposefully fired three barrel bluffs, knowing I was going to get called down and lose, just to put that little question in my opponents’ heads: Does he have it this time? Or is it another bluff? And so the music plays on and we dance our little dance…

I will keep playing 10/20 Limit until I have made between five and ten thousand, then I’ll move back to the 25/50 No Limit tables and hope my luck has changed and that my time at the Limit tables has reinforced some of the studying I’m doing away from the tables. After all, I want to play the game as skillfully as I can and not need to rely on luck to win.

So today was the big Alpha8 tournament at Club WPT that I won entry into earlier this week. The tournament prize pool was 13.9 million play chips, with a 100,000 chip buy-in. Since I won the satellite tourney, my entry was free. I’d been looking forward to this afternoon all week. Finally, I had a chance to see how I’d do against some pretty serious players. At least as serious as play chip players could be, methinks.

I started the day off playing in some cash games and making 100k in play chips at the 100/200 tables before registering for a freeroll tournament to practice and get ready for the big one. The freeroll had 162 entries and I played very well, making the final table and battling all the way to heads-up for the win. My opponent and I were fairly evenly stacked in chips and the battle raged for about 30 minutes, each of us trying to one-up the other. We got it all in several times, each time with the other proving the victor, so the lead changed back and forth at least four times before we came to the final hand. Unfortunately, he had the better hand and I finished in second place. Not a bad warm up.

Four p.m. rolled around and I sat down to play the Alpha8. I managed to win a few early hands, which put me in a chip positive position to play for a while. I opened up my game a bit while the blinds were low, but still played pretty tight, waiting for good cards and making the most of them when I had it. There was one time when I had KJ (King Jack) vs. AJ (Ace Jack) and a jack hit on the flop. After some furious raising, I had him all-in and I was almost all-in. The turn brought a blank, but I got lucky on the river and spiked a jack for two pair and victory in the hand.

I was making good decisions, capitalizing on my opportunities, and using my tight image to pull off the occasional well-timed bluff. In short, I was playing my A game, and it was proving successful. Out of the 139 entries, I was the chip leader with 50 players remaining, and prizes paid out to the top 20. Play continued for two hours and I was doing great – in third place with 12 players remaining – and then I ran into time odds.

Time odds are when a player has a time they have to leave by and, if the other players know it, mean the player has nothing to lose because they cannot stay for the rest of the tournament. I had a family dinner commitment at six, and the tournament was taking longer than expected. So there I was, sitting in third place, with one player to go out before the final table, and I had to dump my chips because I couldn’t stay any longer. I was dealt pocket jacks (JJ) and made a standard raise. I had one caller and the flop came 8-8-A. I made a pot-sized bet, figuring my opponent had at least an ace. He raised me, confirming my suspicion, so I went all in for the rest of my chips. He called and the board came blank-blank. He won the pot with trip 8s and I was out in eleventh, the bubble boy.

If I had had at least 10 more minutes, I would have just folded my way to the final table and felt a lot better about having to leave. As it stands, I just didn’t have the time to play any differently, and I was a bit cranky about it for a while. So close! At least I made the money, which was my first priority after all, and received 139k for my efforts. Next time, I’ll be sure that I don’t have any potential conflicts before entering tournaments, cuz it sucks to be playing so well and have to leave it prematurely. And hey, I didn’t bust out earlier, so things definitely could have gone worse. 🙂